Items tagged with cluster

Last month, we discussed the split between IBM and the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) over the highly ambitious 'Blue Waters' project. Blue Waters was the name of a planned supercomputer that would've been entirely water-cooled and included as many as 524,288 CPU cores. The disintegration of the deal came as some surprise, given the amount of work that'd already been done on the project. New details have come to light on why the University of Illinois and IBM ultimately parted ways over the project. One of the major issues appear to have been the clock speeds of the CPUs....Read more...

Four years ago almost to the day, the National Science Board handed the National science Foundation a mandate to build the most powerful petaflop-class supercomputer in the world. The NSF announced in turn that the system would be based on IBM's Power7 processor technology. One of the features that won IBM the contract was the fact that the cluster doesn't require message passing and could theoretically be programmed as a single system. As of today, Blue Waters is officially canceled. The news comes less than a month after IBM announced it would begin commercial shipments of the individual nodes...Read more...

Earlier this week, we covered news that a California PS3 owner, Anthony Ventura, had filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, alleging that the company's decision to terminate the PS3's Linux support via firmware update constituted a false/deceptive marketing practice. While most PS3 owners never took advantage of the system's Linux capabilities, "Other OS" functionality is critical to the universities and institutions that have deployed PS3 clusters as high-performance compute farms. We talked with several project leads on the impact of Sony's decision, and what it means for low-cost supercomputing...Read more...

Earlier this week, we covered news that a California PS3 owner, Anthony Ventura, had filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, alleging that the company's decision to terminate the PS3's Linux support via firmware update constituted a false/deceptive marketing practice.While most PS3 owners never took advantage of the system's Linux capabilities, "Other OS" functionality is critical to the universities and institutions that have deployed PS3 clusters as high-performance compute farms. We talked with several project leads on the impact of Sony's decision, and what it means for low-cost supercomputing...Read more...

For when you have some serious work to get done... TAMPA, Fla. - (BUSINESS WIRE) - November 14, 2006 - HP today announced enhancements to its Unified Cluster Portfolio for high-performance computing (HPC) at Supercomputing 2006. Product updates include support for new HP servers and workstations powered by Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5300 series processors. The HP Cluster Platform 3000 system now runs new Quad-Core processor-based HP ProLiant servers that offer customers greater energy efficiency and can improve system performance by nearly 50 percent.(1) Additionally, the HP Scalable Visualization...Read more...